Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
The Trump presidency finally and for all time pulled the mask off their "we oppose big government" lie - there is no conceivable way a government could be "bigger" than for it to establish martial law
Some say the Republican Party has gone nuts. In reality, they've simply reached the endpoint toward which they've been moving for 62 years: fascism.
Republican politicians since Barry Goldwater's 1960 campaign have trash-talked "big government" in the United States. Like Reagan's assertions that cutting taxes on rich people would "trickle down" benefits to poor people, or his claim that destroying labor unions would increase take-home pay for working people, this one's just another lie.
Since the 1980s, in fact, the GOP has been the ultimate "big government" party. And now we're learning that Republicans in Congress were, just three days before Joe Biden was to be sworn in as president, calling for the ultimate big government power: martial law to prevent Biden's inauguration.
There's no provision in either the Constitution or US law for a president to specifically invoke martial (or, as Marjorie Taylor Green calls it, "Marshall") law, although a series of statutes under Sections 251-255 of Title 10, passed between 1792 and 1871 and generally referred to collectively as the Insurrection Act, can produce the same result.
They give the president extraordinary powers, allowing him to shut down or seize control of communications systems like cell phone providers or social media companies, freeze or seize the assets of individual citizens or organizations including nonprofit corporations like political parties, and to create a federal police force he can deploy nationwide that is answerable only to himself.
(If all of this sounds familiar, it's almost step for step what Hitler did; we remember its most famous artifact, the Schutzstaffel or SS.)
And that's exactly what members of the GOP's Insurrection Caucus in Congress were asking President Trump to do as recently as January 17th, 2021, all to keep Trump in power for another four years.
Making it all even more shocking, this newly-revealed coup attempt happened months after Joe Biden won the election, the states and Congress had certified that win on January 6th, and the world was preparing to welcome Biden to the White House at noon, January 20th.
The Big Lie isn't just that Trump had an election stolen from him: the GOP has been running a longer con, preparing the ground for Trump, for three generations.
When they started, it was just another grift. But now it has built a strong foundation for martial law and fascism in the United States should another Trumpy Republican win the White House.
It was 58 years ago that Barry Goldwater proclaimed:
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have."
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